Belmont Club

History and History in the Making

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

1942

One of the reasons that Ba'athist combat capabilities declined so precipitously
during Operation Iraqi Freedom was the disruption to daily life caused by combat
operations. People couldn't communicate or travel easily and had to devote most
of their time to scrounging for food and securing shelter. That included the
Ba'athists. They lay low and became ineffective. One of the necessary
consequences of the American efforts to return life in the Sunni triangle to
normalcy is that it provides the very conditions necessary to resuscitate
Ba'athist operations and enable them to mount attacks against Iraqi authorities
and coalition forces. The lifting of the curfew for the Ramadan, the
availability of electricity for longer hours, the freedom to assemble in a
variety of locales without attracting attention -- all of these have unintended
consequences. If one were looking for the primary facilitator of the recent attacks
against Americans and Iraqis in the Sunni area, it would be none other than Paul
Bremer, through no fault of his own.

It was inescapable that the Ba'athists and Islamic terrorists would adjust to
peacetime faster in many ways than US authorities. Many simply had to pick up
the now-working telephones to renew old acquiantances, including those now
working for the CPA or in jobs inside the Green Zone. Reconciliation in action.
Many simply had to become businessmen, like the traders on the Syria-Iraq
border, to import things of interest. Americans thought it was wonderful, and so
did they. Like anyone else, Americans are often blinded by preconcieved notions
of the natural use of things. Where a sailor sees a road a soldier sees an
obstacle; where an American sees a jetliner, a jihadi sees a bomb.
Whoever said that the restoration of public amenities to Baghdad would
necessarily lead to peace?

Whether it will critically depends on how rapidly the United States can
overhaul the Ba'athist lead in local contacts. In one respect President Bush was
indisputably right: the critical resource in Iraq right now is not more United
Nations or French troops. It is not even American troops. It is Iraqi police and
intelligence men. Little wonder that the Ba'athists have been focusing their
attacks on the Iraqi police. That is who they fear most. While Americans have
taken their share of casualties, the Iraqi cops have been dying by the dozen.
Whether at the graduation ceremonies of a police
academy, or being thanklessly blown up defending the UN building at a checkpoint,
or in the station
house, the Iraqi cops have been taking percentage losses that are only
ignored because the press is too liberal to regard them as men. But other men
notice, even if journalists will not. Boots
on the Ground says:

The Iraqi Police were hit the hardest. Immediately, you would think that
many would put down their badges and quit after all the death and chaos of
yesterday. Yet, they all are still there, doing their job. It is truly
amazing, and I am deeply inspired by it.

Yet that shouldn't blind us to the fact that there are Ba'athist agents in
all levels of the new Iraqi bureaucracy. And the police is their prize. The US
is in a counter-intelligence race with professionals on their home ground.
Whether our Iraqis will beat their Iraqis is still an open question. America may
outstrip the enemy in weaponry and humanitarian aid, yet lose this one key race.
Phil
Carter links to a damning report on the shortfalls of intelligence
operations in Iraq.

The 69 "tactical human intelligence teams" operating in the
country at the time of the study, at the beginning of the summer, should have
been producing "at least" 120 reports a day, but instead were
delivering an average total of 30, it states. It attributes that apparent
underperformance to "the lack of guidance and focus" from the
intelligence office overseeing the teams' work.

These are our eyes, and we will need them. After the America ended major
combat operations in Iraq, it left the open spaces of the Clausewitzian world to
battle terror on its shadowy soil. Here, enemies may have names without faces;
voices beckon us alone into the dark; and unacknowledged tokens to monstrous
things surface when we seem among friends. Yet always knowledge will be our
guide; to anticipate, not be surprised; to persuade yet not be persuaded; to
dishearten yet keep the faith; and to remind us that we are still at war.

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Guerilla War Revisited

The classic requirements for the successful prosecution of a guerilla war
have traditionally been:

a secure base in a foreign sanctuary or remote fastness where forces can
be trained, equipped and readied;

a secure source of revenue

a guerilla army, or body of armed men;

a political arm, such as popular front, national liberation front or other
such organization which puts forward an alternative program of governance

All successful guerrilla movements, from the US War of Independence onward,
possessed these characteristics. Although Vietnam conflict was largely fought by
North Vietnamese regulars, it still had these attributes. The intifada is
a modern example of how these principles are applied.

The terrorist forces now attacking Iraq have all these characteristics, save
one. They have not, as yet, created a political arm which will widely appeal to
the different Iraqi ethnic groups. Other than that, they have cross
border sanctuaries in Syria and Iran; a probable source of funding in the
Ba'athist loot and Saudi money and fighters courtesy of international jihad.
On the day they manage to cobble together a credible political movement, arising
from the discredit of the current US efforts, they will be a guerilla force to
reckon with. But not until.

Richard Nixon, who was perhaps the first US President since Kennedy to
seriously consider winning the Vietnam War, attempted to deal with the problem
of cross-border sanctuaries by incursions into the Parrot's beak and other NVA
staging areas in Cambodia. He was not successful. He had greater success
applying airpower directly against Hanoi, in the Operation Linebacker Series,
and by mining the port of Haiphong, which essentially dried up the heavy weapons
supplies from Russia.

The same problem now faces President Bush. This is ironic in one sense,
because it was Syria and Iran that were supposed to have a cross-border problem
with respect to Iraq, the new regime inflaming their own internal instabilities
by example. But the pause in operational tempo arising from US grand strategy,
has seemingly given them an opportunity to turn the tables and seize the
initiative. "Seemingly" because the terrorist attacks, although they
have succeeded in charming the Western media, have two glaring operational
shortfalls: they have not dealt any kind of effective blow against US forces;
second, they have killed dozens of Iraqis and maimed hundreds of civilians
during a sacred holiday period. Their momentary fame on the pages of Le Monde
must be paid for by incurring the hatred of ordinary Iraqis,
and the cops in especial. There's nothing like bombing police stations to get
the flatfoots really motivated.

But that does nothing to ameliorate the problem of sanctuaries, which the
Iraqis cannot deal with. The problem with terrorist sanctuaries, as opposed to
conventional guerilla training grounds, is that they can be very small,
sometimes just a set of rooms in an apartment block in Damascus, or a basement
in Teheran, or a marble-floored palace guest room in Riyadh. The terrorist
operators can be infiltrated separately into Iraq and rendezvous within. The
operational characteristics of terrorist cells make them hard to stop at
borders. Yet they do have one glaring weakness. All foreign sponsored terrorist
cells eventually have a point of contact with the secret services of that nation
or with a high-ranking political leader. Some Syrian Ba'athist general, some
Ayatollah, some Prince.

President Bush's warning against Syria and Iraq for not doing enough to stop
terrorists infiltrating Iraq is less directed toward the leaders of that nation,
as it is toward starting a thread, which will later become a basis for future
action. That thread, which will amplified in the coming weeks, as US-controlled
forces themselves infiltrate these unfriendly countries, is that there is a
causal link between the bombing of innocents in a Red Cross facility and some loathsome
controlling intelligence, which for the moment, sleeps safely across the border.
Sleep tight.

"If someone sees the crescent, he will go to his local sheik with
two witnesses and there will be a list of Thuraya phone numbers for sheiks
in different towns and sheiks in Baghdad," said Moayed al-Adami, imam
of the Abu Hanifa mosque in Baghdad, a revered shrine for Iraq's Sunni
Muslims...

Baghdad, October 24 -- Iraq's American overseers said Friday that they
would lift the nighttime curfew on Baghdad's five million residents
beginning Sunday, to accommodate the country's Muslims during Ramadan and
demonstrate that the country is returning to normal despite the persistent
armed resistance to the occupation. ...

January 31, 1968 - Low clouds cover the sky, early on Wednesday
morning, when the Tet Offense begins in Saigon. Five enemy battalions of
between 2000 and 2500 had infiltrated into the Saigon area. Attacks are
spearheaded by the C-10 Sapper Battalion. The plan calls for 35 battalions
of 4000 locals to attack the following six major targets:

The Vietnamese Joint General Staff Headquarters The Independence Palace
(President Thieu's office) The American Embassy Tan Son Nhut Airport The
Vietnamese Navy Headquarters The National Broadcasting Station The 716th
MP Battalion, with approximately 1000 men, was responsible for the
security of the 130 American installations in the greater Saigon area.
Only one third were on duty, even though they were warned of trouble. Flak
vests had been issued and they were doubled up on shift.

An American colonel was killed and at least 16 people were wounded
early Sunday when a barrage of air-to-ground missiles from a homemade
launchpad slammed into a highly protected hotel where Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was staying.

American military officials said they did not believe Mr. Wolfowitz was
the target but they called the attack carefully planned.

Tet might have been won on the battlefield, but it was an epic defeat
on American televisions and in world newspapers. The Tet offensive's
primary aim was to cause political upheaval in America to give the
Communists a victory exactly like what defeated the French a decade
earlier.

In a daring attack anti-American guerrillas yesterday fired a barrage
of rockets at the al-Rashid hotel, a symbol of the US occupation, in the
heart of Baghad, killing one US soldier and wounding 15 other people,
mostly Americans.

Saigon was the center for most if not all of the news agencies that
were covering the war in South Vietnam. Tet offensive of 1968 was the
first time, during the war, that actual street fighting took place in the
major cities. ... The news media were able to capture this
street fighting on tape in addition to the attack on the American Embassy.
... The reports led the
American people to think that we were losing the war in Vietnam and that
the Tet Offensive was a major victory for North Vietnam. This was not the
case. The VC suffered such high casualties that they were no longer
considered a fighting force and their ranks would have to be replaced by
North Vietnamese regulars.

The misreporting, along with Communist and North Vietnamese agents in
the United States, led to demonstrations in the streets by Americans in
protest of the war. Gen. Giap later wrote in his book, that the news media
reporting and the demonstrations in America surprised them. Instead of
seeking a conditional surrender, they would now hold out because America's
resolve was weakening and the possibility of victory could be theirs.

Saturday, October 25, 2003

The Death of Minds

This, from the New
York Times, about suburbs in France where the name of the game is hunting
down women for gang rape.

VIGNEUX-SUR-SEINE, France — The boys were patient, standing in line
and waiting their turn to rape. Their two victims, girls of 13, were patient,
too, never crying out, at least that is what the neighbors said, and enduring
the violence and abuse repeatedly over five months. That was three years ago.
Late in September, 10 young men, now aged from 18 to 21, were convicted of
rape in a closed courtroom in nearby Evry and sentenced to prison terms
ranging from three to five years. Seven others will go on trial in November.

Many of the boys are raised in closed, traditional families and are
hopelessly confused or ignorant about sex; others are simply street toughs. In
this world, women enjoy little respect; often girls who appear weak, or wear
tight-fitting clothing, or go out unaccompanied by their fathers or brothers,
are considered fair game. To avoid trouble, many girls have taken to wearing
loose-fitting jogging clothes, and hidden themselves behind domineering
fathers or brothers; others have organized themselves into their own gangs.
Many of the Muslim girls have donned head scarves — more for protection than
out of religious conviction.

This, from Space
Daily, about a hundred foot (30 meter) telescope about to be constructed by
the California Institute of Technology, "which would result in images
more than 12 times sharper than those of the Hubble Space Telescope (and) ...
will have nine times the light-gathering ability of one of the 10-meter Keck
Telescopes, which are currently the largest in the world." The Caltech
astro website has renderings
which show a cutaway of the future 100 foot telescope in comparison with the
Mount Palomar reflector, for many decades the largest optical instrument in the
world, looming like an elephant over a goat; an instrument on the Krell
scale. The hundred foot primary mirror will allow astronomers to look further
back in time to conditions in the early universe; to discover hitherto unseen
objects; to better understand the ground of reality on which we, mere mortals,
live.

The contrast between the youth at Caltech, striving to touch the face of God
and the illiterate Muslim boys in a French suburb striving to touch the
underpants of their neighbors is a consequence, not of the difference in their
natures, but of the contents of their minds. Nothing in the US Army arsenal has
been half so devastating to the Muslim world as the Saudi-funded Wahabi
madrassa. For where one can injure the body, the other can destroy the mind. Nor
is there help in the land of France for those who have managed to leave Arabia
yet are never quite permitted to arrive in Europe. The dole for food and a
policeman's truncheon, maybe; but never a candle for the dark; nothing whatever
from the condemned store of Western values.

The New
York Times story goes on, without a trace of self-awareness or irony:

At the vast housing project where the girls lived and where the rapes
occurred, the grounds are clean, even landscaped. The population is
multiracial and multiethnic, blending both French-born citizens and immigrants
from places like North and sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey and the Caribbean.
Nearby are a butcher selling halal meat, an oriental pastry shop and
coffeehouse, a laundromat, a health club and a supermarket — as well as drug
dealers openly selling hashish.

Friday, October 24, 2003

Et tu brute?

In Shakespeare's Julius
Casear and Agatha Christie's semi-literary Murder On the Orient Express,
the pact between conspirators is sealed by their common participation in
stabbing the tyrant, in one act achieving their ends and ensuring their
solidarity. Benjamin Franklin chaffed the hesitant signatories of the US
Declaration of Independence with his famous observation that "we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Anyone who believes that the Ba'athist regime can be revived in Iraq will be
disheartened by the international
pledge of billions of dollars in aid to Iraq. Although Boomshock
has pointed out that the total amounts and disbursement schedules have been
variously and contradictorily reported, the existence of the aid package is not
in dispute. The countries who are committed to ensuring a post-Saddam Iraq
success are led by the US, with a pledge of $20 billion, followed
by:

"Japan, the second biggest donor after the United States, pledged a
total of $5 billion over four years. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait each pledged at
least $1 billion. The European Union and its member countries have pledged a
total of $800 million in Iraq aid for next year."

The rest will be made up of loans by multilateral instutions like the World
Bank, and a hodge-podge of contributions from countries as small as Vietnam. Like Shakespeare's characters, we are all conspirators in tyrannicide now. The
New
York Times observed that "conspicuous by their absence were Germany
and France, two of Europe's richest nations but also Europe's two biggest
opponents of the war against Iraq". Yet even so they will also
contribute, unless they can segregate their money from funds to be provided by
the European Union or the World Bank, which will extend loans to the new Iraqi
government. While making a big show of missing the train, Germany and France
have characteristically purchased secret tickets and will presently board via
the back door before the last coach leaves the station.

Where does this leave Saddam Hussein, variously rumored to be plotting
secretly in Tikrit or leading the pastoral life of a goatherd in western Iraq?
With a dwindling stash of funds. For however large his initial nest egg, coming
as it did from emptying the Iraqi central bank cash reserves, it will never grow
by a dollar more without access to oil revenues, which are barred to him
forever. Where does this leave France and Germany, now making their way toward
the dining car after their stealthy entry into the caboose of the aid train?
Looking like cheap gatecrashers and not the Great Powers they styled themselves
to be. And if they meet with a less than rousing reception, they might remember
the bitter observation of Count Ciano,
as the fortunes of his Duce dwindled, "victory has a hundred fathers but
defeat is an orphan."

Thursday, October 23, 2003

The Dustbin of History

The Left has consistently portrayed itself as the party of the Future and the
vanguard of history. But in truth it has become a party of the old. According to
a recent
survey by Harvard's Institute of Politics, nearly 90% of American college
students consider themselves patriotic and nearly two thirds (61%) approve of
President Bush's job performance. The rejection of the Left within its academic
bastion can only be compared to a defeat of the US Army within the infantry
training grounds of Fort Benning. If, having lost organized labor and the
American working class, the Left cannot hold here, it can hold nowhere.

Nor is the shrinkage of the Left confined to the demographic sphere. It is in
full retreat across the whole map of the globe. First ousted from Eastern Europe
and the former Soviet Union, the Left has been unceremoniously evicted from the
formerly Nasserite Arabian peninsula, where it has been supplanted by radical
Islam. Even in the Pacific, hardly a trace can now be found of the Communist
Party of Indonesia or PKI, once the third
largest in the world after China's and Russia's in the 1960s. It has been
replaced by the Jemaah
Islamiyah.

The last strongholds of Left are in the aging countries of Western Europe,
whose liberal attitudes are increasingly at odds with the socially more
conservative, burgeoning and youthful populations of the Third World. The recent
elevation of the openly gay Gene Robinson by the American Episcopalian Church
underscores the widening cultural gap: it was met with fierce criticism from the
Third
World Episcopalian Churches, who threatened schism unless the unscriptural
act were withdrawn. The liberals, unaware how far out of step they were, and
perhaps still under the illusion that they represented the future rather than
the past, served notice that they would cut off the Third World churches from
monetary assistance unless their gay bishop was accepted, to which Bernard
Malango, the primate of Central Africa replied gamely, "This is simony.
Let the powerful people keep their money."

The decimation of the Left, which has come upon them so quickly that they
have hardly assimilated the fact, will have enormous implications. The first is
the political vacuum created by its fall, which Islam will rapidly strive to
fill. The second is the dislocation of organizations like the British
Conservative Party, which have largely defined themselves in opposition to the
Left, a Left that is no more, leaving them to grope for a positive reason for
existence.

The Left is dead, although the fact is not yet apparent to all, least of all
to the dwindling Communist faithful. But the fact remains, and it reminds us of
Nietzche's prophetic parable which concludes:

"I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not
yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not
yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of
the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and
heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars - and
yet they have done it themselves.

Wednesday, October 22, 2003

The Rumsfeld Leak

There's considerable debate, especially over at Lieutenant
Smash, about the propriety of journalists reporting on an internal
Department of Defense memo listing self-examinatory questions on the War on
Terror. The memorandum from Secretary Rumsfeld lists out what may need to
be improved in the US defense establishment in order to effectively combat
terrorism. It appears
to have been addressed to a key inner circle concerned with these issues:

The memo was sent to Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Marine Gen. Peter
Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs; and Douglas Feith, undersecretary of
Defense for policy.

The key point of the memorandum
is that the US military may be too conventional to combat small groups of
terrorists; spending "billions" to counter an opponent's efforts worth
"millions". It also worries whether America is doing enough to counter
Islamic militancy as an idea.

Rumsfeld asks whether the Defense Department is moving fast enough to
adapt to fighting terrorists and whether the United States should create a
private foundation to entice radical Islamic schools to a "more moderate
course." Rumsfeld says the schools, known as madrassas, may be churning
out new terrorists faster than the United States can kill or capture them.

The issue of whether or how the leakers should be tracked down will not be
the subject of this post.

But it is not exactly true, as White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan
said, that this self-questioning is "exactly what a strong and capable
secretary of defense like Secretary Rumsfeld should be doing" -- it is
what the nation should be doing, and it is not. The truly disturbing aspect of
this memorandum is that Rumsfeld's transformational efforts were directed to a
relatively small group of people. For many Congressmen and Senators, who
ultimately determine what the military buys, national defense is still about
jobs generated by Cold War bases and pork-barrel weapons projects, not about
winning the war against a shadowy enemy. That attitude is probably shared by a
plethora of defense contractors and career officers whose prospects would suffer
should some of the Rumsfeld questions be answered forthrightly.

There is also the issue of whether Rumsfeld, like Jackie Fisher in an earlier
era, may carry his zeal for change too far. Just as Admiral Fisher, in remaking
the British Royal Navy for the age of battleship warfare, went a step too far in
advocating the fragile battlecruiser design, configuring the US military to
fight terrorism may ignore the fact that it may still be called upon to fight
conventionally, both in the Middle East and in the Korean peninsula.

It is the mark of Liberal empty-headedness that the Rumsfeld memorandum
should be simply regarded as revealing "significant doubts about
progress in the struggle against terrorists", the kind of mentality
that would have observed that lifeboats are smaller than the Titanic, instead of
seeing it as an opportunity to debate how best to defeat an enemy that would
first kill us, then pervert our children. Note to Rummy: address the memo to the
American people.

Al-Qaeda's Deepest Secret

Wish I knew what it was, but Ron
Rosenbaum thinks he knows what it is:

Here’s the passage in The New York Times with The Wall Street Journal’s
statement—you decide: "[Mr. Lévy] nonetheless speculates that Mr.
Pearl was pursuing evidence that Al Qaeda and North Korea were receiving
nuclear secrets from Pakistani scientists with ties to the I.S.I. and
fundamentalist groups ….

His speculation, based on a recent book by journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy, is
that Al-Qaeda, North Korea and Pakistan are somehow involved in a plot to
produce and detonate a terrorist nuclear weapon; that Danny Pearl stumbled on to
the plot accidentally and was killed to silence him. The sadism was a bonus.

It sounds like a crock, but there's this just in today from the Washington
Post:

U.S. investigators have concluded that Wall Street Journal reporter
Daniel Pearl was slain by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the senior al Qaeda leader
believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,
sources familiar with the case said yesterday.

Although Mohammed has long been suspected of playing a direct role in
Pearl's kidnapping and death -- and was named by two Pakistani defendants as
the actual killer more than a year ago -- U.S. officials said previously that
they did not have enough evidence to confirm those allegations.

But two U.S. officials said yesterday that new information obtained in
recent months has confirmed that Mohammed slit the reporter's throat with a
knife in January 2002. Mohammed was captured in March at a safe house in
Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and has since been held and interrogated by U.S. forces
at an undisclosed location.

"It is true that the U.S. government now believes that KSM was
responsible for Pearl's death," said one U.S. official, referring to the
common shorthand used to identify Mohammed. "Before, we simply didn't
know, but we have now moved towards thinking that we do. Our view on the
likelihood that he did it has certainly hardened."

The official declined to comment on what evidence led to the new U.S.
view of the case, which was first reported yesterday by the Journal.

The new evidence is likely to be collateral evidence -- additional
information from someone other than Khalid Sheik Mohammed -- of an extremely
convincing nature, possibly from someone who also participated in Pearl's murder. But
if KSM were in fact Daniel Pearl's executioner, the fact would be extremely
suggestive.

Why would KSM hide his culpability? As the killer of more than 3,000
people on September 11, he would hardly fear being accused of an additional
murder. The Washington
Post earlier reported that KSM was 'cooperating' with US authorities yet
apparently kept the Pearl incident under deep cover. What was so significant
about the Pearl killing that it warranted concealment?

Why would KSM, the operational planner for Al-Qaeda, concern himself with
the murder of a single journalist? The murder took place in the critical
period between the ouster of the Taliban from Afghanistan and the
commencement of operations in Iraq: a time of crisis for international
terrorism.

None of these questions amounts to a hill of beans without further
information and it is useless to speculate further. However, they provide enough
purchase to alert us to watch for certain things. The first is whether the US
government puts KSM on trial, for his participation in September 11 or the
Daniel Pearl murder. And it doesn't look like KSM is going before a judge any
time soon. According to CNN's
Mike Ensor:

U.S. officials say they have what they call new evidence indicating to
them that it was, indeed, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed ... who personally slit the
throat of Daniel Pearl ... who was kidnapped and killed ... in January 2002.
Now Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, this [would be] an extraordinary act for a man
who was the mastermind, one of the senior officials in al Qaeda, to commit a
murder personally. But U.S. officials say they are now convinced ... based
on this new information, that he actually did the killing himself. Now, officials
say they do not believe he will be put on trial any time soon for this murder.
He is a prisoner at an undisclosed location outside the United States, of the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, but officials wouldn't rule out a trial or
legal action against him at some time in the future.

The strong implication is that US intelligence is eager to get certain
secrets of such importance that they are willing to forgo KSM's prosecution for
the time being. The second is to watch the Saudi-Pakistani-North Korean
triangle. The truth is out there.

Monday, October 20, 2003

Islam Eats Up Marx, Part 2

Mr. Alex
Magno of the Philippine Star eloquently skewers the five parliamentarians
who walked out on President George Bush's speech to the joint session of the
Philippine Congress. He describes them individually, describing the aspects of
their careers in the Communist Party that make them such unattractive
characters, including acknowledged participation in bloody purges, toadying to
Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, cop-shooting and then fleeing at one stage to America
for political asylum. But he forgives them these, being Communists, did they not
demonstrate the additional and unforgivable crime of discourtesy to a guest.

Mr. Magno should take heart. Twenty years ago, these Leftist worthies would
have been the life of the party. But their cachet is slowly fading among the
elite, even of Philippine academia, because the faint odor of the passe has
attached to them. And nothing is more lethal in the cocktail set of the
archipelago than to wear yesterday's fashions. Today's darlings, in case these
Communists bravos did not know, are Muslim militants. The paisley shirts,
kaftans, denim jackets, bell-bottom trousers and sandals now belong in the
museum of antiquities, or to use a less kindly phrase, the "dustbin of
history". The apparel du jour are the billowy trousers, matted beard,
skull-cap and upturned shoes of the Islamic jihadi, which these aging
leftists are too chicken to wear. Or the Kevlar helmet, night vision goggles,
desert camouflage utes and Oakley sunglasses of the Men of the West, which they
are not worthy to wear.

Sunday, October 19, 2003

The Great Game

Ralph Peters, writing one of his last articles for US War College's journal, Parameters,
characterized the September 11 attack as a final attempt by the Arabs to retain
control over an Islam that had escaped its bounds. He pointed out that the bulk
of Muslims lived outside of Arabia: in Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent,
and in Malay archipelago. In a brilliant essay, Peters said:

Our focus on the Middle East has been so exclusive that we have come to
see Islam largely through an Arab prism. But the Islam of the Middle East is
as fixed, as unreflective, and ultimately as brittle as concrete. We have
forgotten that Islam is the youngest of the world’s great religions, that it
is still very much a work-in-progress on its vast frontiers, and that its
forms are at least as various as the myriad confessions and sects of
Christendom.

... Religions change, because men change them. Fundamentalists insist
upon an ahistorical stasis, but evolution in the architecture of faith has
always been essential to, and reflective of, human progress. ... On its
frontiers, Islam remains capable of the changes necessary to make it, once
again, a healthy, luminous faith ... But the hard men from that religion’s
ancient homelands are determined to frustrate every exploratory effort they
can. The Muslim extremist diaspora from the Middle East has one consistent
message: Return to the past, for that is what God wants.

But for men like Osama Bin Laden to succeed, the non-Arabian Muslims must
heed the call. Otherwise, the Islamic fundamentalist enterprise is doomed to
fail. The world’s most populous “Muslim” countries stretch far to the
east of the Indus River: Indonesia, India, Bangladesh . . . Pakistan . . . and
other regional states, such as Malaysia, make this the real cockpit of crisis.

It is in this context that US geopolitical strategy is best understood.
President George Bush is now completing a six-country tour of the Western
Pacific, touching on Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia and
Australia. In that group, Thailand, Singapore and Australia represent the hard
core of new coalition ringing the Malay Archipelago, with the Philippines the
weak and junior partner. His penultimate stop will be Indonesia -- the vast
hinterland of Islam, in Peter's analysis -- before concluding his sojourn in
Australia, whose massive bulk forms the westernmost anchor of the enterprise.
But it is the Bush meeting with Chinese premier at the APEC meeting in Bangkok
that may prove most interesting. Here the subject may shift to Central Asia, the
great region of the Islamic 'stans, and China's concern there.

Traditionally, China has watched its western marches closely for signs of
Islamic unrest. Across the Indus were the Czars, and their late heirs, the
Soviet Commissars. But lately a new player has arrived on the scene: the United
States. The sudden descent of the United States on Afghanistan and its presence
in the neighboring ex-Soviet countries has awakened China to a new power across
the Indus. It has reacted by adopting
measures to strengthen it's hand in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan,
not just diplomatically, but with the intention of creating a new free trade
zone there. For the first time since the long-gone days of the Raj, three major
powers are met in depths of Central Asia, in the land of the 'stans: Russia,
China and the United States. The parallels with the Raj are nearly exact because
the United States, apart from its presence in Pakistan, has established a new
diplomatic closeness with India. Pakistan, with its teeming Muslim millions, and
India with greater numbers still, whose "more than 15 percent of its
billion people are Muslims, outnumbering the Islamic population of
Pakistan", in Ralph Peter's perceptive analysis.

This then, is the position. America has occupied Iraq, between
the Arabian Peninsula and Iran; it occupies Afghanistan, between Iran and the 'stans
of Central Asia. It is strongly posted on the Indian subcontinent. It is
constructing a coalition in the Western Pacific composed of countries which
would be in mortal peril should militant Islam gain a hold in the Malay
Archipelago. It has drawn in Russia and China into the Central Asian arena,
where a new Great Game would perforce create a three power oversight over the
Islamic nations there. Whoever tries to create an Islamic state anywhere will
find enemies ready-made. This is geopolitical quartering at the highest level,
but it has one ultimate psychological goal: to develop an ummah that is
physically and well as mentally free of the desert sands. America understands
that this is Arabia's last call, and its response has been to invite Muslims
elsewhere to take their own counsel and gaze, for the first time, at the land
upon which they stand.

Saturday, October 18, 2003

Open Source Religion

Three apparently unrelated news items are united by a single thread: the
question of whether the quest for knowledge can be subordinated to a
preconceived goal or whether it must lead the seeker whither it will. The answer
of Mahatir
Mohamad is that the goal may be set in advance and knowledge simply made the
means to achieve it. His goal is Islamic victory over the Jews and knowledge,
scientific knowledge in particular, the signal method to attain it.

It is surely time that we pause to think. But will this be wasting time?
For well over half a century we have fought over Palestine. What have we
achieved? Nothing. We are worse off than before. If we had paused to think
then we could have devised a plan, a strategy that can win us final victory.
Pausing and thinking calmly is not a waste of time. We have a need to make a
strategic retreat and to calmly assess our situation.

We are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped
out. The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the
Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them. ...

We are enjoined by our religion to prepare for the defence of the ummah.
Unfortunately we stress not defence but the weapons of the time of the
Prophet. Those weapons and horses cannot help to defend us any more. We need
guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships for our defence. But
because we discouraged the learning of science and mathematics etc as giving
no merit for the akhirat, today we have no capacity to produce our own weapons
for our defence. ...

We must build up our strength in every field, not just in armed might.
Our countries must be stable and well administered, must be economically and
financially strong, industrially competent and technologically advanced. This
will take time, but it can be done and it will be time well spent. We are
enjoined by our religion to be patient. Innallahamaasabirin. Obviously there
is virtue in being patient.

In Mahatir's view science and mathematics can be harnessed to bring the 7th
century into the 21st. "Whether we like it or not we have to change, not
by changing our religion but by applying its teachings in the context of a world
that is radically different from that of the first century of the Hijrah."
In this conception, the iron-lunged muezzin is replaced by the loudspeaker at
the minaret, but the Adhan remains the same. And in much the same spirit,
he advises the ummah to put aside swords and horses in favor of "guns
and rockets, bombs and warplanes" to secure the submission of the world
as the prophet did in days gone by.

The second article is a review of the open
source methodology. It is a cooperative method which has made possible the
development of vast repositories of information, the most famous of which is the
Linux operating system. But it has also generated a treatment for cholera
costing a dollar and a quarter, mapped Mars, put vast libraries of literary
classics online, created a free encyclopedia to rival Brittanica, catalogued the
Human Genome and threatens to overturn the traditional regime of intellectual
property rights. The Open Source method is a framework to achieve three things:

A Shared Goal

Shared Work

Shared Results

When Linus Torvald started building an operating system in 1991, he posted an
appeal on a newsgroup asking interested programmers to contribute ideas and
code. The result was Linux and the rest was history. But the one thing he didn't
ask, which is the one thing essential to Mahatir, was how the effort related to
the victory of the ummah over the Jews. In one sense, Linus Torvald
achieved his spectacular technological result by relinquishing total control
over the project and decoupling it from an external agenda. In the Open Source
universe, the technological wonders Mahatir so ardently desires are readily
creatable, but only at the cost of not aiming them against anybody.

The third article is an obscure announcement
that the US Department of Defense has selected the Falcon, a rocket developed by
a small startup company called SpaceX,
to launch the TacSat-1 communications satellite. What's special about the Falcon
is it's cost: "Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) is developing a
family of launch vehicles intended to reduce the cost and increase the
reliability of access to space by a factor of ten." Here a spectacular
advance in the economics of space transformation has been made possible by a
combination of venture capital and the entrepreneurial quality of the US
economic system. And the question none of SpaceX's investors is asking is how
their returns will square with Koranic teachings on rates of interest. Unlike
the Open Source methodology, which rejects the role of ownership in the realm of
knowledge generation, the market system stresses the centrality of ownership
rights in the transformation of basic knowledge into products.

In the world described by the first article, the essential knowledge is fixed
and can only be found within the hive, although its accidental manifestations
may be as modern as you like. In the world of the second article, truth can be
found most efficiently by a hive, but neither the nature of the truth nor the
membership of the hive is fixed. In the world of the third, knowledge must be possessed
not by the hive, but by individuals, in order for their economic application to
take place. A country like the United States enables it's citizens to transit
seamlessly between the second and third universes, which exist in parallel, one
fertilizing the other. The challenge before Mahatir Mohamad is to allow the
inhabitants of his first universe to sojourn briefly in the alien spaces of the
second and third, before returning gratefully, at each day's end, to their
separate otherness. That, he said, was the way of the Jews.

Friday, October 17, 2003

The Storm Breaks

Daniel Drezner's excellent post on The
State of Islam uses the Organization of the Islamic Conference's 10th
Summit as a proxy for measuring the state of Muslim attitudes toward the
Unbeliever, and the Jew in particular. The widely reported remarks of Mahatir
Mohammad to the effect that Jews rule the world are Drezner's first datum. The
fact that the remarks went unchallenged, and were indeed applauded by some
Muslim leaders like Megawati Soekarnoputri is his second.

While Al-Qaeda has been operationally trounced, it has apparently
succeed in raising a standard under which many Muslims, including their leaders,
are ready to flock. Mahatir Mohammad's speech represents an open rebellion
against the heretofore unchallenged diplomatic legacy of the West. It is a
public rejection of the secular standards of conduct which have largely governed
the conduct of international affairs since the Second World War. It marks the
return of long banished words like Jew, Christian and Mussulman, pogrom and jihad
to the vocabulary of international discourse. It is a line in the sand inscribed
with a scimitar.

And the sword has been sharpened on both sides. An ABC
poll taken in mid-October of 2003 showed that:

The percentage of Americans having an unfavorable view of Islam has
jumped from 24 percent in January 2002 to 33 percent now. The portion of
Americans who say that Islam "doesn't teach respect for other
faiths" rose from 22 percent to 35 percent.

This is astounding considering that the January 2002 poll was taken in the
immediate aftermath of the September 11 attack and that the Western public has
been unremittingly assured by its leaders that Islam is pacific. There has been
a mustering in the night driven by some unspoken instinct which the press is
loathe to report.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the aircraft which destroyed the World
Trade Center towers smashed the United Nations as well. The great loser of the
post 9/11 world has been the secular internationalist movement, what Steven den
Beste refers to as Tranzism,
symbolized by the European Union, the International Criminal Court and the
United Nations. Mahatir openly regards secular internationalism as another
abominable Jewish
invention, to be rejected root and branch. At the 10th Islamic Summit, he
presented his false dichotomy:

We are up against a people who think. They survived 2000 years of
pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully
promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting
them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others.
With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and
they, this tiny community, have become a world power.

And he wants it destroyed. Yet in his own way and for other reasons,
President George W. Bush has been loosening the foundations of Tranzism from
the other direction as well, nowhere so effectively as by his magnificently
ironic characterization of Islam as "the Religion of Peace". And by
paying outward respect towards the United Nations while disregarding it in
practice, he has single handedly demolished it, with its attendant companions,
like the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto, regarding it perhaps, as
less a defense than a hindrance, more a suffocating cloak than a sure shield. He
too has been raising a standard to which the many
have flocked, sensing and perhaps anticipating, what course events would take.
It is not the flag of Jewish conspiracy, but really the American vision of 1776,
offered up to a larger world.

Mahatir should have known that those who would present, sword in hand, a final
revelation to the world will inevitably call forth a new prophet from out of the
desert -- or from beyond the seas.

Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Hasta la vista, ma cherie

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, could celebrate the fecundity of Europe without irony
or embarrassment when he wrote, in Locksley
Hall that:

I that rather held it better men should perish one by one,
Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon!
Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day;
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

Unless plans miscarry, within the next 36 hours, Yang Liwei, Zhai Zhigang and
Nie Haisheng will be the first
Chinese to ascend into the cosmos in a spacecraft manufactured in Cathay. It
is an historic moment in more ways than one. For the first time since the
humiliation of the Opium Wars, China will demonstrate a clear mastery over
Europe in a key and complex technological area.

Nothing could underscore the emptiness of European socialist pretensions more
than the imminent launch of the taikonauts from a country at once
ex-socialist and ex-colonial. Nothing daunted, the Guardian
sneers: "What will the Chinese find on the moon? Anything and everything
that the Americans may have left behind." And there, in a phrase, is
the entire imposture of supposed European superiority and sophistication. It
manages to embody a disdainfulness of everything American together with the
suggestion that they simply scorn to achieve what they could easily win were they to
turn away from 'higher' pursuits. Now comes a hint that the lofty 'would not' is
really a 'could not'. And the darker suggestion that their reluctance to
confront Islamic Terror is less attributable to moral courage than to a
palpating and naked fear.

But where they could clothe themselves in the mantle of artistic loftiness to
explain away the fact that middle class white Swedes earn
less than blacks in Alabama, what excuse remains now for European backwardness in the face of the
Chinese technological demonstration? None whatsoever. And so:

Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day;
Better fifty years of China than a Brussels stuck in yesterday.

Whose Bells are Ringing?

Hat tip: Glenn
Reynolds. Kevin Sites of MSNBC is blogging from Baghdad. One of the
vignettes is his encounter with a Filipino-American soldier named Conrad
Vasquez (photo included).

Crossing the border from Jordan into Iraq, I meet a young
Filipino-American private named Conrad Vasquez (shown in the photo at the top
of this post). He has an M-16 with 40mm grenade launcher slung over his chest.
He is highly professional and remarkably good-natured considering he has been
here going on eight months now. He says border duty is a vacation after a tour
in the infamously hostile city of Fallujah, one point of the so-called Sunni
Triangle filled with Saddam die-hards. I ask him if he wants to use my phone
to call his family.

“No sir,” he says, “it’s just me and my sister and she’s
serving in Baghdad.”

“What happened to your parents?”

“My mother died of a stroke and my father…well he was killed in the
Philippines.”

“How?”

“Well sir, have you heard of Abu Sayef.”

“Of course, the Philippine fundamentalist Islamic group with reported
ties to Al Qaeda.”

“Yes. Well sir, he was a member.”

“So are you Muslim,” I ask.

“No sir. I’m Catholic. But the people around here are very
respectful when they heard my father was.”

That one story encapsulates the improbabilities that every person of Filipino
descent is heir to. Anglo first name, Hispanic surname, dark complexion,
American infantryman with a sister in the US armed services, father killed while
a member of an Islamic fundamentalist group, Roman Catholic. Yet indubitably,
fighting for us all. What would you make of Conrad Vasquez?

Well, the answer that most Filipino customs officials would give is: money.
Philippine officialdom, remiss in nearly all things, sedulously finds ways to
shake down any person of Filipino descent returning for a visit. Is that
chocolate you have in your bag? Do you mind if I have it? How about $50 as a
homecoming gift?

The answer that most Filipino 'nationalists' would give, if they are ever to
qualify for an interview with the BBC is: traitor. Never mind that the elite
would never have admitted him into their homes or into their counsels. He has
betrayed the nation in the deepest way possible: by forgetting his place, which
was to serve as a menial and to obey without question the pronouncements of the
graduates of the University of the Philippines.

The answer that most overseas Filipinos would give is: a man. A man who has
seen the world, stands on his own two feet and is building a modest nest egg
toward his future. A free man. And the Bells of Balangiga ring wherever he walks
the earth.

Monday, October 13, 2003

What Shootout?

The death of Fathur Roman Al-Ghozi as he 'attempted to run a checkpoint' in
Pigcawayan, North Cotabato probably did not happen as advertised. But first, to
the basics. It apparently is Al-Ghozi. Compare this file photograph of
the Light Rail Transit bomber from the Sydney
Morning Herald to his picture, lying on a mortuary slab, in the Philippine
Star. One will at once notice that his two prominent front teeth are
identical in both photographs, in addition to the striking resemblance between
the two faces. It is Al-Ghozi.

But the next thing to notice from the mortuary picture is the bullet entry
wound to his left chest right about where the heart would be. It is not an
exit wound, otherwise the hydrostatic shock of a bullet fired at close range (he
ran the checkpoint, remember?) would have pushed out considerable material from
the wound channel. This is inconsistent with the story of the shootout.

The second item of interest is an article from Rexel
Sorza of Islam Online dated September 21, 2003, at least three weeks before
Al-Ghozi's demise.

In August 2003, Al Ghozi was reported to have sought refuge in Sultan
Naga Dimaporo and Maigo, both of Lanao del Norte. The manhunt suddenly
shifted to Kabuntalan and Datu Piang in Sultan Kudarat, all of Maguindanao,
and Midsayap and Pigcawayan of North Cotabato.

That would seem to indicate that even newspaper reporters knew that the
Philippine Military were closing in on Al-Ghozi. Anyone familiar with towns like
Pigcawayan knows it consists of a single main drag off which a number of muddy
cowtracks diverge. The idea that a hunted Al-Ghozi would come barreling down
that single highway right through a cordon sounds a little strange. Here's the
'official' version
of events.

Military and police officials said Al-Ghozi, 32, and an unidentified man
were tracked down in a small van that tried to run through a checkpoint on the
Cotabato-Davao Highway at about 8 p.m. Sunday in Barangay Pugon in Pigkawanan
town, North Cotabato. Al-Ghozi allegedly fired twice at the police officers
and troops manning the checkpoint and was killed. Police said Al-Ghozi took
five bullets — two in the chest, one on his left side, one each in both
arms. Philippine National Police chief Director General Hermogenes Ebdane, who
flew to Mindanao yesterday, said the other man escaped.

Right. The van just drove on. Or maybe the other 'unidentified man' jumped
out and showed the breathless cops a clean pair of heels. But not before Al-Ghozi
fell out of the van or jumped out, maybe, with five wounds,
including one right through the heart, which remember, had to be fired from the
front.

Fathur Roman Al-Ghozi killed many people in the December 30, 2000 bombing of
a commuter train in Manila, including children. Although his death removes a
public danger, there is little to be gained by this crude Philippine government
dramatization. If there's one thing we should hate more than being lied to by
the enemy, it is being taken for fools by our friends. The Philippine government
should say he was summarily executed, and that he had it coming. That would be
the manly and responsible thing to do.

Giants in the Stratosphere

At the end of September, 2003, Lockheed
Martin won a Department of Defense competition to build a 500-foot long airship
that would hover quasi geosynchronously (as if it were hovering over a
fixed spot) at the 70,000 foot altitude. The altitude was chosen, according to Lockheed
Martin because the quiet wind conditions above the Jet Stream minimized the
energy required to keep it in position. That propulsion would be provided by an
energy generating solar
film which would power the motors required to keep it in position.

The stratospheric airships are part of a constellation
of 11 which will be deployed by NORAD to "provide overlapping radar
coverage of all maritime and southern border approaches to the continental
U.S." They will be as long as a destroyer, 22 stories in height and
will remain on station without descending, for six months at a time. Each
airship will loft an electronics package of 4,000 pounds in weight.

The concept and general physics of a high altitude airship have been touted
for some time. Both the European
Space Agency and the Japanese
have long understood the potential of these platforms for communications relay,
remote sensing and surveillance, but the Lockheed Martin ship is the first
serious attempt at actual flight and series production. The commercial potential
of these platforms is so great that the United States government hopes
to recover a part of its investment by selling communications bandwidth under 10
U.S.C. 2371 and Section 845 of Public Law 103-160.

According to a recent article by ABC
News, high-flying blimps would be an ideal platform to deliver wireless
internet services blanketing whole continents.

These high-tech blimps could carry up to 4,000 pounds of
telecommunications gear and float it up to 13 miles into the stratosphere. At
that height, far above any conventional commercial air traffic or turbulent
weather patterns, the Stratellite would act as a wireless communications hub
to provide wireless voice and data services for an area of up to 300,000
square miles.

"It's perfect for outlying areas that can't get broadband telephone
or cable [TV] access," says Sanswire CEO Michael K. Molen.
"[Subscribers] just put up a small antenna and they're in business."

It's early days yet, but with the advent of manned commercial
suborbital flight now imminent, the development of outer space is continuing
apace. The twenty first century, if it can avoid reverting to the eighth under
the dominion of radical Islam, will mark the start of mankind's first tentative
essays into the solar system.

Saturday, October 11, 2003

Would you like DDT or Coffee?

The FDA is warning that terrorists will probably attempt a mass poisoning
attack in the United States within a year (Hat tip: Little
Green Footballs). According to Reuters:

WASHINGTON, Oct 10 (Reuters) - There is a "high likelihood"
within the coming year of a deliberate attack or accidental outbreak in the
U.S. food supply that sickens a large number of people, the Food and Drug
Administration said on Friday. Although no specific threats were identified,
the FDA said it came to the conclusion because of recent foodborne outbreaks
and recent reports that al Qaeda was plotting to poison the food supply. ...
The agency said salmonella, E. coli 0157:H7 and ricin pose a significant
threat because of there easy dissemination to food. Anthrax and botulism were
considered the most deadly.

In Would
you like flies with that?, the Belmont Club noted that Al-Qaeda was
already perfecting the poison attack method by testing
it on the acting President of Chechnya. The story from the September 29 Guardian
noted that "The acting president of the war-torn Russian republic of
Chechnya was last night fighting for his life after an elaborate attempt to
poison him days before crucial presidential elections. The attempt would appear
to mark the Chechen rebels' first successful use of poison to attack a Russian
official". Recalling the history of the airplane attack tactic, which
was in development since 1995, the Belmont Club concluded that a mass
poisoning would sooner or later be attempted on "the chow line on an
aircraft carrier, a major industrial plant or a major sporting event"
just as soon as the tactic was perfected. A poisoning attack would strike at one
of the most vulnerable points of American life. The food service business is
universal and almost no one subjects cooks, busboys and kitchen staff to
security scrutiny. The FDA warning is official notice that a poisoning attack
will probably happen.

With the old Al-Qaeda core rapidly
withering under US pressure and on the defensive everywhere, the Islamists
must hearten their base by inflicting thousands or tens of thousands of
casualties in the United States. Given the extent of their current penetration,
their best
bet is to create a brand new attack cell. Dan Darling links to an article
suggesting they may be planning just that:

Dubai: Al-Qaeda is preparing a new attack in the United States on the
scale of September 11 after adopting a new operational structure which is
impenetrable to US intelligence, a Saudi weekly reports in its Friday edition.
"An attack against America is inevitable," Al-Majallah quotes the
Islamic militant network's newly-appointed spokesman Thabet bin Qais as saying
in an email to the paper. Al-Qaeda has "carried out changes in its
leadership and sidelined the September 11, 2001 team", the paper quotes
bin Qais as saying. "Future missions have been entrusted to the new
team, which is well protected against the US intelligence services. The old
leadership does not know the names of any of its members."

A successful mass poisoning would create a strategic problem for the United
States. With the reduction of Afghanistan and Iraq, all the obvious geopolitical
terrorist targets have already been eliminated. A new 'September 11' might
provide the motivation to strike Iran, Saudi Arabia or Syria in response, but
there will be questions over whether this is direct or creative enough. The other
aspect of responding to mass poisoning is that terrorists will have crossed the biological
weapons threshold, albeit in less than theatrical manner. Hollywood has
accustomed the public to thinking of biological weaponry in terms of an Ebola
virus, anthrax or other exotic pathogen in the manner of the 28
Days Later. But an attack that wipes out half the audience of a football
game or the diners at a school cafeteria will be a chemical or biological strike all the same.

One unconventional type of response would be anonymous retaliation. Suppose
airline catering food were contaminated at five different sites, leading to the
crash of a three dozen wide bodied passenger jets. One riposte, in addition to
conventional operations against state supporters of terrorism, would be to
counterpoison the chow lines of the most notorious madrassas, those which
are thinly disguised Islamic terrorist training centers, without attribution.
There are a number of problems with this approach, as well as singular
advantages. The most obvious problem is legal. Although the US President can
initiate the assassination of a terrorist individual, it is unclear whether he
can order what amounts to a secret biological counterstrike against an enemy.
But there are advantages too. It means that the US can retaliate proportionately
against the guilty parties without warring on entire nations. It also avoids the
problem of not retaliating against a biological weapon with like. Just as
the lack of response to numerous pre-September 11 attacks convinced Osama Bin
Laden that he could continue to strike with impunity, a simple manhunt for the
perpetrators of a mass food poisoning which the FDA is now warning against will
convey a fundamental unwillingness by the United States to defend itself against
weapons of mass destruction. Some means must be found to retaliate against a
biological attack which avoids the twin pitfalls of either a blanket response
against state supporters of terrorism or doing nothing at all.

Wednesday, October 08, 2003

The Tormentors

Parapundit
links to a Mark
Bowden (Blackhawk Down) interview on the use of torture. Bowden uses the word "coercive
interrogation" to refer to the whole spectrum of pressures which can be applied
to a suspect to extract information or cooperation. Many types of coercive
interrogation are actually legal, even when more distressing to the subject than
traditional physical violence. "In fact, the word 'torture' does not
even apply when interrogators employ only moderate physical and psychological
pressure, Bowden argues". But Bowden less interested in the ironies of
torture than whether "coercive interrogation" should be used -- and
perhaps used more often -- in the War on Terror.

Bowden begins by noting that coercive interrogation fell into almost total
disuse in the period before September 11:

It's fairly clear that starting in the mid-1970s, when there was a
general crackdown on the CIA, the United States stopped using coercive methods
of interrogation for a long period of time—although I believe they started
up again after September 11.

That provides the setting for the question he really wants to pose: is
coercion ever justified if it will save lives. He sets forth his position this
way:

I set out to do this story without any clear idea of how I felt, other
than a sense that in certain circumstances it seemed that torture was the
appropriate thing to do. But I hadn't made a serious study of the matter, and
I really didn't know how I would feel about it when I got to the end of
writing this article. So what you see in the course of this article is me
wrestling with the implications of torture and the current situation and what
I really think about it. Like any sensitive person, I don't relish the idea of
inflicting pain on someone, or making someone miserable. But by the same
token, if you can save lives—if people are plotting mass murder and you have
a chance of preventing it—it's hard to argue against whatever methods work.
And so I wanted to know how I felt about it, what exactly I was talking about,
what was being practiced by people today and whether it was legal or not.
Those are the questions that I've tried to answer. And I know the
Administration, judging by its reluctance to cooperate with me in any way, was
not particularly eager for me or anyone else to do this.

Bowden comes to the conclusion that "coercive interrogation" beyond
certain strictly defined limits should never be legally permitted but quietly
practiced when absolutely necessary. He argues that maintaining
"coercive interrogation" as contrary to policy will ensure it will be
resorted to only under extraordinary circumstances -- when those who apply it feel so
situationally compelled that they are willing to run the risk of imprisonment to
attempt it.

So I agree with Jessica Montell, the very articulate activist I
interviewed in Israel, in saying that if the law bans torture, at least those
people who are practicing coercion have to face the possibility of being held
accountable for their actions. The law acts as a constraint on the use of
coercion.

Randall
Parker disagrees. He thinks this dualistic attitude is not only mentally
dishonest, it also forces low level subordinates to assume the legal liability
for pursuing tacit national policy. "The public shouldn't be allowed to
morally have it both ways. Ditto for leaders. This is corrupting and unfair to
those who protect us and dishonors them." Under this dictum, any
coercion applied to a terrorist must be explicitly authorized by policy as
exercised by responsible officials.

Yet moral issues aside, is explicit authorization for coercion even
practical? The usual examples used to justify coercion normally involve
scenarios when innocent lives can be saved by extracting time-critical piece of
information from a ruthless enemy. This best describes tactical interrogation,
which often occurs opportunistically, in the field, far from any judges,
ombudsmen or lawyers, under conditions of uncertainty and unbearable time
pressure. But any time an interrogator can afford the delay necessary to
authorize coercion is a circumstance he almost certainly doesn't need to use it.
And for that reason Bowden may be right. Almost any conceivable system of
authorized coercion will be unjustifiable, given the time overhead and the
availability of alternative compulsions within broadly legal limits. And almost
any morally justifiable act of coercion will arise in circumstances which often
cannot even be foreseen and where obtaining the necessary permission is
impractical.

While conceding the justice of Randall Parker's argument, the most practical
attitude is probably Bowden's. Excessive coercion should remain illegal except
in circumstances so grave that nobody gives a damn.

Islam eats up Marx

Steven
den Beste continues a fascinating article on the nature of Tranzism,
a term for the new, post-Marxist ideology of the Left, and doesn't seem to think
that Tranzis and Islamists are in competition,

I don't see how Islamism competes for followers with transnational
progressivism. They are not really playing in the same space, physically or
demographically or culturally. They really aren't in competition with one
another yet, and for the moment they're cooperating against their shared enemy
of capitalist liberal democracy.

The Left will continue to lose adherents to Islam. It will be
cannibalized by Islam in its most militant fringes. Only the softies, i.e.
artists, writers, 'sympathizers' will stay in the dreamy Tranzi universe,
which will no longer have a viable clandestine substructure. All the hardcases
will have to go elsewhere.

While Islam and Tranzism share democracy as a common enemy, there is no love
lost between them. Nowhere is the takedown of Marxists so apparent as in the
guerilla movements. For example, the leadership of the Philippine southern
insurgency passed from the Marxist Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) in the
1970s to the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in the
1990s. Those who once read the Little Red Book now read the Koran.

But nowhere has the Marxist loss been so dramatic as in the Arabian
Peninsula. The Mideast
Web has a page describing the history of Palestinian poltical parties,
including Fatah and Hamas, and the majority had Marxist
beginnings. And yes, Yasser Arafat was a Marxist once, a fact that makes socialists
mourn like exiles by the waters of Babylon remembering Zion. It would be
possible to draw similar comparisons in Algeria or South Yemen.

Even Marxists in the West have found themselves gravitating, willy-nilly to
the Islamic cause. Perhaps the most potent image of a Marxist 'martyred' to
Islam is the American Rachel
Corrie. In an earlier era, she would have found a suitable Socialist cause
to fight for. This was how she ended
her days.

Tuesday, October 07, 2003

Tranzism

Steven den Beste has a fascinating post
on the new ideology of the left, which he calls Tranzism, short for
Transnational Progressivism.

In essence, the deep ideology is a combination of neo-Marxism, idealism,
elitism (i.e. anti-populism), post-nationalism and, it turns out, a form of
compassionate neo-racism.

Unlike the Belmont Club's take on the same phenomenon, Islam
and the End of the Left, Mr. den Beste does not regard the new ideology as "nonsensical
or internally contradictory". He believes it may hang together nicely.
While the basic thesis of Islam
and the End of the Left is that the Leftist periphery has taken over the
vacuum produced by the death of the Bolshevik core in a destructive implosion,
the 'Tranzism' theory asserts that an evolution of formerly Marxist elements has
stepped forward to replace it. If so, Tranzism is Bolshevism's successor, not
its remnant, and represents a new ideological point of view.

In contrast, Belmont Club regards the new ideology as precisely
nonsensical and internally contradictory because the old Bolsheviks purposely
accoutered the outer layer of the Party with all kinds of inconsistent 'fronts'
as protective coloration. And now that the Bolshevik inner Party has shriveled,
the parti-colored skin has wrapped itself around the skeleton, contradictions
and all.

It would be interesting to see whether Tranzism proves consistent or whether
it contains unresolvable inner contradictions that will lead to its
self-destruction. The best test is to advance a hypothesis and see how it bears
out. In the spirit of discussion, Belmont Club will make these
predictions:

The Left will continue to lose adherents to Islam. It will be cannibalized
by Islam in its most militant fringes. Only the softies, i.e. artists,
writers, 'sympathizers' will stay in the dreamy Tranzi universe, which will
no longer have a viable clandestine substructure. All the hardcases will
have to go elsewhere.

The Left will continue to fragment. It will be unable to solve the problem
of factionalism which plagued early Socialism, and remained until Lenin
invented the Bolshevik Party as a device to provide closure to the endless
debates and to provide a vehicle for militant action.

This will not happen if Tranzism were truly a viable combination. I
will make the partisan argument that we are already seeing Number 2
happen in the US Democratic Party and the UK Labor Party and in the recent
reverses suffered by the EU and the Kyoto Treaty efforts. But time will tell.

Sunday, October 05, 2003

No More Safe Haven

The Israeli
strike against a terrorist training camp in Syria has just raised the cost
of the diplomatic game that France, Germany and much of the Arab world have been
playing. In essence, that diplomatic arrangement provided for the continuation
of the intifada against Israel as a perpetual theatrical scapegoating of
the Jews to provide the psychodrama so beloved by the Western Left and middle
eastern dictatorships. Israel alone could provide the Left with the illusion of
righteousness, however twisted, with which they wanted to invest themselves. But
the ritual slaughter of Jewry required that immunity be conferred on Yasser
Arafat, the continued subsidy of the Palestinian Authority and its subordinate
creatures, Hamas and Al-Aqsa by the European Union; and the willful
blindness by the Security Council toward the Syrian occupation of Lebanon
and its proxy war against Israel via Hezbollah.

The price of the ritual slaughter has just gotten a tad too
high.

By striking the terrorist training camps in Syria, Israel is forcing the
Palestinian Authority's international backers to assume the costs of its
campaign against the Jews. 'We will widen the war', Sharon seems to say. The
explosions will no longer be confined to Israel. Now they will be felt in
downtown Damascus and will echo in the Champs de Elysee. The Western Left will
not be able to continue their riskless game of Jew-bashing unless without
feeling the effects in their pocketbooks. For the reality is that Europe, more
than anyone else, is dependent on Middle Eastern petroluem. Now that the
torchings and window smashings can no longer be confined to the global ghetto
and threaten to spread unchecked to the oil supplies on which their holidays
depend, the spectacle of mutilated Jewish children will no longer be very funny
to the Leftist European.

Now the real consequences of French miscalculation will be felt. The Quai
d'Orsay's anti-American campaign has riven the Security Council, which can no
longer be counted on to push the Israeli flood back between the dikes. Since
Europe is powerless to restrain Israel from striking its Arab clients, only
America can rein in Israel and France is in no position to ask George Bush to
act on its behalf. The only course left to Syria and the Quai d'Orsay is to
sponsor a Security Council resolution condemning Israel, in the hope that
America will be pressured into forcing Sharon back so that the psycho-dramatic
massacre of Jews can continue. Yet even here the bats will be flapping back to
roost. America and Israel have been so demonized by France and the Arab capitals
that one more invective will literally count for nothing. One more pie in the
face is irrelevant to a man covered in spit and crowned in thorns. Israel has
grown insensible to insults and America too weary of Arafat's shenanigans to
make more than a token attempt to appease domestic Leftist opinion.

The truth is that the Left has prepared its own bed of nails. Now it must be
prepared to lie upon it.

The End of Al-Qaeda

Donald
Sensing links to an assessment
by Singaporean terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna that Al-Qaeda has nearly been
exterminated. In "the past 24 months, al-Qaeda has severely suffered and
... within one year al-Qaeda will be totally destroyed". But he warned
that, in going out of business, Al-Qaeda's had redefined itself as an enabler
rather than a direct supplier of terrorist services. "Al-Qaeda does not
pose the same level of threat it posed in the past and today most of the attacks
are being conducted by groups armed, trained and financed by al-Qaeda and not by
al-Qaeda itself", so that while in declining, it has passed on the
baton to other groups willing to take its place. What Professor Gunaratna does
not answer is how an Al-Qaeda penetrated
by American intelligence can safely nurture budding terrorist organizations
without compromising them. But clearly Gunaratna was surprised at American
gains. A year earlier, he saw little chance that Al-Qaeda would be
overthrown. An interview with the Indian
Express in August, 2002 made it clear he thought them a strong as ever.

Q: Nearly a year after 9/11 how do you assess the US-led effort to
neutralise the Al Qaeda?

A: I think it has been a failure. Their biggest failure was their
inability to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, Al Zawahiri, Mullah Omar. Unless
these three are killed or caught the US cannot say they have been successful.
The Al Qaeda can replenish its human losses and material wastage as long as
these leaders are alive. What the US has done is only destroy their training
camps. As a result, the Al Qaeda has decentralised operations into regional
theatres like Somalia, Indonesia, Yemen, Chechnya, the Pankshi Valley in
Georgia and others. This means that the Al Qaeda will survive for a longer
period.

Today he is giving them a year to live. The surprise is that Al-Qaeda agrees
with Gunaratna's new pessimistic assessment. According to Amir
Taheri, Osama Bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri has just circulated a
tape calling for a strategic retreat. "In a taped message, played in
Islamist cells all over the world and broadcast in part by two Arab satellite-TV
channels, the Egyptian (believed to be hiding either in Pakistan or in Iran)
presents the strategy in three segments."

A campaign to seize power in Muslim countries, especially Pakistan;

Expanded efforts to attack the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan; and

The exploitation of instability in Muslim countries like Indonesia, Yemen
and Somalia.

Taheri points out that the al-Zawahiri tapes mark a return to a conception,
once rejected by Osama Bin Laden, that radical Islamism needed to gain strength
within the Muslim world before taking on the "the last champion of
unbelief in the world" -- the United States of America. Where Bin Laden
felt ready to challenge America directly, al-Zawahiri is tacitly acknowledging
the need to gradually seize state power within the Islamic world as a prelude to
the great showdown. Al-Zawahiri is seeking two things in particular: a nuclear
weapon through Pakistan and the creation of a 'Vietnam' in Iraq and Afghanistan
which would allow the western left to withdraw the forces confronting the
Islamic terrorists.

If so, Al-Zawahiri's strategy to seize power in Pakistan is off to a bad
start. It is uncertain whether he even has the capability to save
himself. "Oct. 03, 2003 ANGORE ADDA, Pakistan - Pakistani soldiers
swooped down on an al Qaeda mountain hide-out in the country's forbidding
tribal region Thursday, killing 12 suspected terrorists and capturing 18 others
in the military's largest-ever offensive against Osama bin Laden's network. It
was not clear whether any senior al Qaeda figures were among the dead or the
captured, who all appeared to be foreigners, army officials said. The area in
Pakistan's fiercely autonomous Waziristan region has long been considered a
likely hiding place for bin Laden, a Saudi exile, and his top deputy, Ayman
al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian." Certainly the ring is closing on the
Egyptian. Pakistani newspapers report
that "Authorities in the semi-autonomous South Waziristan tribal region
are being given a three-day deadline to tribes, calling on them to surrender Al
Qaeda suspects and take punitive action against anyone harbouring
terrorists" who had escaped from the deadly raid.

Considering these circumstances, it is doubtful whether Gunaratna's
assessment that Al-Qaeda will continue to arm, train and finance franchisees
will prove realistic. Any clandestine operator worth the name would shun it like
the plague. A dying clandestine organization is terminally infected with
double-agents, compromised safe houses, dubious funding sources as well as the
legatee of a failed strategic model, and Al-Qaeda is no exception. The only hope
for a radical Islamic successor would be to develop a new organization and
sidestep the failures of the old ones. It has become increasingly likely that
Al-Qaeda, like the Nihon Kaigun after the Marianas Turkey Shoot, is now a
spent force. What America must await is its successor, which may appear at any
moment, as the kamikazes did at Lingayen, in the clear skies above a
still unsuspecting world.

The Press that Saw Nothing

Just 8 months ago, CNN
touted Haifa as the triumph of tolerance over Arab-Israeli suspicion:

HAIFA, Israel (CNN) -- Billboards in Arabic say: "I Love
Haifa," posters advertise "Co-existence Works," there is an
Arab-Jewish Center, and the city is serious about community relations.
Resident Dr. Mordechai Peri says Haifa follows its mayor, Amram Mitzna's,
lead. "He knows how to deal with minorities, he knows that equality is
the most important thing between Arab and Jews," the doctor said. Another
resident Dr. Butrus Abu-Manneh agrees, adding Mitzna has given three top city
jobs to Arabs. Jews come to the Arab quarter, to mingle, drink coffee, go
shopping and get along. Mitzna says he can do for Israel what he's done for
Haifa.

Some
of the gloss came off that prospect today as a huge bomb ripped through a popular Haifa restaurant:

At least 19 people were killed today when a suspected Palestinian
suicide bomber set off an explosion inside a landmark beachfront restaurant
packed with a lunch crowd at the start of a long holiday weekend, according to
Israeli police, who said they believe the bomber was a woman.

The victims included children and at least four Arabs. Haifa Mayor Yona Yahav
said, "This restaurant was a microcosm of Haifa society -- Jews,
Christians and Arabs worked together in this restaurant for many years. The
suicide bomber tried to jeopardize the co-existence we've worked so hard to
build up." He left out one element of the microcosm: Islamic terrorism.
That name remained unmentioned in Reuters
account, which cast the suspicions, if anything, on the lack of Jewish
tolerance in Haifa as the root cause of the tragedy.

"Arabs, who make up 12 percent of Haifa's population, became
citizens of Israel when the Jewish state was created in 1948 in parts of what
had been British-mandate Palestine. Many complain of institutionalized
discrimination by the Jewish majority, and three years of fighting between
their Palestinian brethren and Israel has driven a wedge of suspicion between
the country's Arabs and Jews. Though several suicide bombings in buses
and cafes have shaken the Haifa's confidence in itself as a rare example of
coexistence, residents still believe harmony can be preserved. 'I can't hear
the words Arab and Jew,' Tony Matar, one of the Arab owners, said at Haifa's
Rambam hospital where injured relatives and employees were taken."

Tony Matar's sentiments are laudable. But those who wish to utter the words
'Arab' and 'Jew' in the same sentence must first learn to intone 'Arafat', 'Hamas'
and 'Al-Aqsa'. One of the great myths of the liberal project was that it was
possible to speak of good without mentioning evil; that universal brotherhood
was attainable without abolishing slavery. The Roadmap to Peace leads nowhere in
large part because the press has made murderers and terrorists out as
'militants' and 'activists', turning them into invisible men, not only without
guilt, but also without existence. Only the victims in Israel have names.